Designing in Zoo Tycoon 2
Designing in Zoo Tycoon 2 is a fairly recent practice that started in 2006. Members at Zoo Admin discovered how to open and edit the game's files. This has lead to the creation of new animals, objects and others for Zoo Tycoon 2 for other fans to download.. ZT2 designing typically improves with the release of each new expansion pack. For example, before the release of Extinct Animals, the only way to make a theropod dinosaur was to shrink the wings of a secretary bird, and model editing was impossible. How designing works The game's files are in .z2f format. These files can be opened with WinRAR and extracted from the files to another part of the PC. Once this is complete, files can be edited freely. Coding This is the most basic part of designing. Mostly, it just involves replacing the name of the original animal with that of the desired animal, but behaviors can be edited as well. Files involved in coding: * .beh - "Behavior". These files contorl how an animal acts and what it does. * .tsk - "Task". These are the tasks that correspond with the coding in the .beh files. * .xml - These files are used for a variety of purposes, like the animal's adult and young files as well as its Zoopedia article. A text editor as simple as Notepad can be used for all of these. Skinning This involves editing the texture files of your animal. An animal's model is laid out in a flat sheet called a "uvw map". It lists all the animal's body parts. One can either edit the textures of an existing animal or create a new "uvw". Programs typically used to skin are Adobe Photoshop, the GIMP, and Paint, and DXTBmp is used to umloack the images. An animal has a regular skin, a dirty skin, a sick skin, and a sick-and-dirty skin. Skin files are typically in .dds or .tga format, and sometimes in .bmp. Another recent practice involves editing the "alpha" channel in the skin, which can help add details such as feathers, spines, and other thigns that are hard to add in the model. Meshing Meshing is the most recent factor of designing. It originated in late 2006 when fans discovered that it is possible import the animal's model file and edit it. It is unknown why that term was coined, most likely as it resembles modeling with clay, the "mesh" of an animal. One of the very first meshed animals was the African wyvern (a kind of dragon) by Simba, meshed out of a secretary bird. The wyvern was filled with a lot of glitches and bugs, so experienced designers typically discouraged meshing for the time being. Even after more than a year of meshing, websites such as ZT2 Designing Centre still does not give support on meshing. There are two types of animal model files: .nif and .bfb. NIFs can be edited, but BFBs are protected, and there's no program that can open them. Even RALCGM, a cheap written program designed to deal with unknown file types, cannot open BFBs. These files use seperate files labelled "Materials" to support an animal's texture files. There has been endless speculation to why Blue Fang converted their NIFs to BFBs in the first place. Artifex, the first user-made expansion group, is (as of yet) the only group that has sucessfully edited BFBs, although they have not revealed how. On the other hand, NIFs can be imported into Blender or 3DSMax and edited by vertices. Then it can be exported. The exported file will not work in the game - the shape data must be pasted back onto the original file. That keeps the animal's appearance but keeps the necessary components needed for it to work ingame. There is even a method to edit the NIFs in a viewing program called NifSkope, but that method typically is time-consuming and based largely on guesswork. See also *List of designers Category:Designing